In the News: South Side Sharing, Didgeridoo Dilemma

On Chicago’s South Side, public-school students forced to share books because of underfunding have boycotted classes in protest.

Welsh academics are concerned about plans by the Cardiff council to sell eighteen thousand manuscripts dating back to the fifteenth century.

Robert Pinsky has won the eleventh Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize for his recent collection “Gulf Music.”

Media inquiries continue into claims that Sarah Palin, as mayor of Wasilla, sent three letters to the head of the town’s library asking whether the librarian would be willing to ban books. Palin told the Anchorage Daily News that “the letters were just a test of loyalty as she took on the mayor’s job.”

Revenue growth has slowed at the Waterstones bookstore chain, in the U.K., because of a dearth of nonfiction releases.

HarperCollins has apologized for an Australian edition of “The Daring Books for Girls” that includes instructions on how to play the didgeridoo, which Aboriginal advocates say is taboo for females and could cause infertility.

Australian poet Robert Gray on his latest book: “It’s the most onerous project since the Sistine Chapel ceiling.”

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The league, we’ve been told for the past year, is desperate to stay out of politics. But it’s clear that some constituents are judged to be more important, more valuable, than others.

Although the N.F.L. has long banned substances such as anabolic steroids and growth hormones, the First Amendment is believed to be the only right guaranteed by the Constitution to be included on the list.